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FCC stands firm on Monday deadline for Comcast-NBCU comments

Speak now (or at least by Monday) or forever hold your peace. That's the word from the FCC for those who wanted more time to gather data to comment on the Comcast-NBC Universal merger.

Bloomberg, among others, had asked the Commission to extend the comment period to early August; the agency declined.

Unofficially, Comcast continues to attract its own breed of comments such as the item by Phillip Swann, president-publisher of TVPredictions who flogged the MSO over recent indications that it will deliver more than 150 high definition channels later this year using switched digital video.

"The cable operator is just trying to bamboozle subscribers into thinking that waves of additional channels are coming their way. But they are not," Swann wrote. "Comcast may offer some HD channels but it won't offer as many as DirecTV, Dish Network, Verizon, AT&T, Cablevision or a few other providers because it doesn't want to pay programmers to carry their channels."

For its part, Comcast is reportedly going whole-hog with 3D TV and is switching from Motorola to Pace set-tops to get two-way capability and MPEG-4 as it adopts SDV.